I think I ended up as Forbes' business travel blogger because I’m the only Wharton MBA to become a travel writer. I grew up in New England and worked in finance in Tokyo before B-school. Later I moved to Los Angeles to work in the film industry.
In 1998, stunned by my only ever layoff, I began exercising skills (and, let's be frank, pleasures) I’d long left dormant: writing and traveling. A decade and a half later: so far, so good. In addition to Forbes, I’ve been published from Travel+Leisure and the Los Angeles Times to dozens of Lonely Planet titles. I can speak Japanese and French, read Korean menus and embarrass myself in Spanish, Italian and Chinese.
And I continue to polish my business chops with cross-cultural consulting work for companies across the US. In my most traveled year, I logged over 140,000 air miles.
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Ex-TSA Chief Calls Airport Security Screenings 90 Percent "Clutter"

America’s airline security system spends 90 percent of its effort looking for “clutter” and distracting agents from genuine threats. So says Kip Hawley, former Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration in a new book.

TSA’s approach, Hawley says, “writes down rules and says ‘these things are prohibited and must be confiscated.’ Al Qaeda terrorists get a hold of that list and learn how to make bombs out of things that are not on it. Then we put in security measures against the new threats, but we don’t go back and see whether the old security measures are still needed.”

Meanwhile, the traveling public is contemptuous over long waits, inconvenience, and perceived intrusiveness over screening for items that pose no risk.

“We need to prune these regulations in a major way,” Hawley says.

That’s the crux of his book, Permanent Emergency, co-written with Nathan Means. Hawley was the TSA’s head from mid-2005 through the end of the George W. Bush administration in January 2009.

Other recommendations voiced by Hawley in an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal: giving TSA officers more flexibility and accountability in the screening process; eliminating airline baggage fees so that passengers won’t be so eager to carry luggage on board in the first place; and randomizing security: “if terrorists know what to expect at the airport, they have a greater chance of evading our system.”

Although Hawley calls liquids “still very much a threat,” he notes that the TSA has the technology to screen them. Passengers with liquids could choose a security line equipped with a special scanner for liquids. “The line would run a little slower since there might be false positives, but people might be willing to wait. And if you combine that with eliminating other currently prohibited items, the lines could be shorter everywhere.”

Hawley does give credit where due. “What we needed was to stop was the catastrophic loss of planes and their passengers,” Hawley says, and measures like armored cockpit doors, air marshals and armed pilots have largely eliminated this risk. He also credits public awareness; fliers are more attuned to suspicious behavior and more apt to subdue dangerous passengers.

Hawley also praises the Department of Homeland Security’s and TSA’s intelligence gathering capabilities for new threats. “If someone at TSA gets a shred of intel, they are all over it. I think that’s the strongest point of TSA.”

Moreover, Hawley is not advocating a return to pre-9/11 security. He calls many of the security measures put in place after 9/11 “heroic” and notes that obvious weapons like guns, bomb components and large knives were prohibited on planes long before 9/11, and toxins should continue to be banned.

But ultimately, Hawley says, there’s risk in traveling anywhere. “The government cannot protect you from getting stabbed, either on the street or on a plane. Someone who’s determined to do physical harm can make a dangerous item out of just about anything, including their hands.”

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Finally some perspective instead of the withering TSA propaganda campaign that has been ongoing in recent months, while they grope children, harass and rob elderly couples and smuggle drugs through our airports. How broken is a government agency that it needs a full time staff of propagandists?

TSA is an arrogant and abusive agency that does nothing to improve security and only adds to the already high level of misery in air travel. Just last week a TSA screener was convicted for smuggling drugs through security and four more this week in LAX. Another four were arrested in the past year and are awaiting trial. These drugs could have as easily been bombs and for all of TSA’s groping of children and strip searches of grandmothers wouldn’t have stopped an attack.

There were a total of 91 TSA workers arrested in the last 16 months. This included 12 arrested for child sex crimes, over twenty for theft from bags and even one for murder. There have been five reports of TSA screeners sexually assaulting travelers this week including three children, an elderly couple they molested and robbed them of $300 in Detroit and groping a Congressman twice in one week. How many incidents need to occur before people get the fact that this agency is broken?

TSA has done more damage to our liberty, way of life and morality than Al Qaeda could have ever hoped to do. Every time someone defends this sick agency they hand another victory to the terrorists. Bin laden would be so happy.

It is sad that America has become a nation of sheep and cowards that will sacrifice their rights and basic humanity in exchange for a false promise of security.

You’ve spent years defending the indefensible and only now do you talk about risk assessment. Try throwing in statistical analysis, historical fact, logic, and other empirical evidence — all of which prove the vanishingly small risk of someone’s being the victim of a terrorist attack in this country.

I can’t imagine anything will happen before the election, but hopefully after. Trouble is, TSA now has all these people and all this fancy equipment, so will they continue to maintain it all just so they don’t have to scape it and reduce staff?